LABOUR’S anti-Semitism scandal could have been fabricated by Israel, a leading trade union boss said in comments branded “despicable”.

Mark Serwotka, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, made the extraordinary allegation at a TUC fringe meeting during its annual conference.

His comments were immediately condemned by outraged equality campaigners who branded the claims “despicable”.

Mr Serwotka, a friend and ally of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, told the meeting Israel could have “created a story that does not exist” to distract attention from its own “atrocities”.

He said: “One of the best forms of trying to hide from the atrocities that you are committing is to go on the offensive and actually create a story that does not exist for people on this platform, the trade union movement or, I have to say, for the leader of the Labour Party.”

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Jennifer Gerber, director of Labour Friends of Israel, said: “Mr Serwotka’s comments are despicable. There is a problem of antisemitism in the Labour Party because of antisemites and Jeremy Corbyn’s failure to deal with them, not because of Israel.

“For a general secretary of a major trade union to allude to conspiracy theories and blame Jews for their own persecution shows the extent of the problem we now see on the left.”

He said anti-Semitism was “a crisis which has never been gripped since the start of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership and has placed his position, his record, his views, his conduct at the heart of it”.

Mark Serwotka and Jeremy Corbyn (Image: GETTY)

Jeremy Corbyn has been engulfed by an anti-Semitism scandal (Image: PA)

He told a debate in the House of Lords: “It astounds me that it is a revelation no longer worthy of questioning that I believe the leader of my party, Jeremy Corbyn, has been a perpetrator of anti-Semitism.”

Baroness Altmann, a Conservative peer and former minister, urged the Lords to “take note that one of our mainstream political parties is led by an anti-Semite”.

She said: “As I have grown up in this wonderful country, I have never understood how the Holocaust could have happened.

“My family fled Nazi persecution and I would not be here today had they not done so. I never understood how European citizens could turn on friends to the extent of being willing to murder them as aliens. This was beyond my comprehension, until the last couple of years.”

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Crossbench peer Lord Pannick said it was “alarming that in this great country that gave refuge to my grandparents, when they were fleeing pogroms at the end of the 19th century, the leadership of one of our major political parties is incubating anti-Semitism”.

Responding for the Labour front bench, Lord Beecham said: “It is deeply disappointing that this appalling manifestation of racism should still be with us.

“It is especially troubling that there are people who are in denial about the problem.”

A Labour Party spokesman said: “Jeremy Corbyn is a militant opponent of anti-Semitism.”